Archives for category: Education Reform
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Capital & Main: How Employers Use Technology to Thwart Union Drives

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2021 //
2

In part one of its review of union busting, written by Jo Constantz, Capital & Main examines how employers use technology to defeat unions.

It begins:

During a Zoom call set up by union representatives and employees who had organized a worker organizing committee, “We noticed that managers of the company had busted into the meeting — they had crashed our Zoom call,” recalls Lorena Lopez, a director of organizing with UNITE HERE Local 11. “Workers started to get very nervous and shut down their cameras so they wouldn’t be recognized. I was running the meeting and asked everyone to ID themselves. But the company people refused.” During the meeting, a worker on the cleaning crew had volunteered to be the spokesperson for the group. According to Lopez, this worker was confronted by management the next day and pressured to quit.

“They were spying on us — and it was easy to do via Zoom,” she says. Under a settlement agreement with the NLRB, the company agreed to post flyersinforming employers of their right to unionize and pledged not to ask them about organizing efforts and not to surveil their Zoom meetings. A lawyer for the company did not return requests for comment.

Workplace surveillance, already widespread in the U.S., has become even more prevalent during the pandemic as employers try to enforce public health measures and monitor remote workers. According to research by Gartner, a market research firm, 60% of large employers use workplace monitoring tools, twice as many as before the pandemic. Coworker.org, a labor research nonprofit, recently compiled a database of over 550 of these commercially available products, which it dubs “little tech,” and published a study outlining potential harms and noting the industry’s general lack of regulation.

Open the link and keep reading.

Categories Education Reform, Ethics, Inequality, Technology, Unions

The Most Important Article You Will Read About the Attempted Coup of January 6

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2021 //
68

Barton Gellman is a staff writer for The Atlantic. He is amazingly prescient. Right before the election of 2020, he wrote an ominous article speculating that Trump, if the election results were close, might refuse to concede. He foresaw the chaos that Trump would indeed unleash, undermining the integrity of the election, which is the central mechanism of democracy.

Now he has written an equally astonishing article in The Atlantic, in which he warns that “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.” He summarizes Trump’s strategy to overturn the election of 2020 by trying to persuade Republican legislatures to overturn the popular vote (if the Democratic candidate wins it) and submit slates of Trump electors for certification by Congress.

Trump put pressure on Republican state officials in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia to override the popular vote, but that didn’t work. Then he tried to stall the certification of the election on January 6 to buy time to get some of those states to withdraw their certification of Biden’s victory. One of his clown-car lawyers, Sidney Powell, appealed to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on January 5 to halt the official count the next day, hoping to buy time to turn a few states. And of course, Trump pressured Vice President Pence to stop the vote or allow Trump allies to filibuster the count.

The article may be behind a paywall. I subscribe to The Atlantic, so I don’t know. or, the magazine may allow you to read it for free.

Gellman analyzes the ideology of the Trump zealots. Their unifying bond is their belief that they (white patriots) are being replaced by non-whites and Jews. He calls it “The Great Replacement” and reminds us of the white nationalists and fascists who marched in Charlottesville and chanted, ”The Jews will not replace us.”

Gellman describes in detail the actions by Republican legislatures to take control of the vote in 2024, so there won’t be a repeat of 2020. The new laws allow the legislatures to ignore the popular vote and choose the electors themselves. So if a Democratic candidate wins a Republican controlled state, the legislature has given itself the power to choose electors who will cast the state’s electoral vote for the Republican candidate.

He sounds a warning:

A year ago I asked the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse how he explained the integrity of the Republican officials who said no, under pressure, to the attempted coup in 2020 and early ’21. “I think it did depend on the personalities,” he told me. “I think you replace those officials, those judges, with ones who are more willing to follow the party line, and you get a different set of outcomes.”

Today that reads like a coup plotter’s to-do list. Since the 2020 election, Trump’s acolytes have set about methodically identifying patches of resistance and pulling them out by the roots. Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, who refused to “find” extra votes for Trump? Formally censured by his state party, primaried, and stripped of his power as chief election officer. Aaron Van Langevelde in Michigan, who certified Biden’s victory? Hounded off the Board of State Canvassers. Governor Doug Ducey in Arizona, who signed his state’s “certificate of ascertainment” for Biden? Trump has endorsed a former Fox 10 news anchor named Kari Lake to succeed him, predicting that she “will fight to restore Election Integrity (both past and future!).” Future, here, is the operative word. Lake says she would not have certified Biden’s victory in Arizona, and even promises to revoke it (somehow) if she wins. None of this is normal.

Arizona’s legislature, meanwhile, has passed a law forbidding Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, to take part in election lawsuits, as she did at crucial junctures last year. The legislature is also debating an extraordinary billasserting its own prerogative, “by majority vote at any time before the presidential inauguration,” to “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election.” There was no such thing under law as a method to “decertify” electors when Trump demanded it in 2020, but state Republicans think they have invented one for 2024.

In at least 15 more states, Republicans have advanced new laws to shift authority over elections from governors and career officials in the executive branch to the legislature. Under the Orwellian banner of “election integrity,” even more have rewritten laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote. Death threats and harassment from Trump supporters have meanwhile driven nonpartisan voting administrators to contemplate retirement…

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, excommunicated and primaried at Trump’s behest for certifying Biden’s victory, nonetheless signed a new law in March that undercuts the power of the county authorities who normally manage elections. Now a GOP-dominated state board, beholden to the legislature, may overrule and take control of voting tallies in any jurisdiction—for example, a heavily Black and Democratic one like Fulton County. The State Election Board can suspend a county board if it deems the board to be “underperforming” and replace it with a handpicked administrator. The administrator, in turn, will have final say on disqualifying voters and declaring ballots null and void. Instead of complaining about balls and strikes, Team Trump will now own the referee….

The Justice Department has filed suit to overturn some provisions of the new Georgia law—but not to challenge the hostile takeover of election authorities. Instead, the federal lawsuit takes issue with a long list of traditional voter-suppression tactics that, according to Attorney General Merrick Garland, have the intent and effect of disadvantaging Black voters. These include prohibitions and “onerous fines” that restrict the distribution of absentee ballots, limit the use of ballot drop boxes, and forbid handing out food or water to voters waiting in line. These provisions make it harder, by design, for Democrats to vote in Georgia. The provisions that Garland did not challenge make it easier for Republicans to fix the outcome. They represent danger of a whole different magnitude…

There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it. Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without.

Democracies have fallen before under stresses like these, when the people who might have defended them were transfixed by disbelief. If ours is to stand, its defenders have to rouse themselves.

Please read this article.

Categories Education Reform

Jeff Bryant: How Community Schools Help Revive Erie, Pennsylvania

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2021 //
6

Jeff Bryant recounts the story of the revival of Erie, Pennsylvania, which was in the depths of despair, both as a city and as a school district.

Manufacturing was leaving the city, white- and blue-collar jobs were disappearing, poverty levels were rising, the public schools were losing enrollment, and the city and its schools were in deep deficit.

He writes:

As good-paying jobs left Erie, families increasingly left the local schools. By the 2016-2017 school year, the district estimated its schools were 5,000 students below capacity, reported the Erie Times-News, which meant less money was coming into the district from the state, compounding the district’s long-standing funding deprivation from the state—among the lowest in Pennsylvania, according to the Erie City School District’s assessment.

Asking local taxpayers to dig deeper was not an option in a city where almost 28 percent of residents lived below the poverty level, the median home value was significantly below the state average, and an abundance of government-related buildings made almost a third of the real estate tax-exempt.

Erie’s school district was also bleeding money to an expanding charter school sector, one of the largest in the state. In the 2015-2016 school year alone, Erie paid more than $22 million to charter schools.

Students remaining in district schools tended to be the ones who were the costliest to teach. In a 2016 report using data from the 2014-2015 school year, 80 percent of Erie K-12 students were classified as poor, and 17.6 percent qualified for special education services. The district was also in the top 3 percent among Pennsylvania school districts for the number of English language learners.

Jeff explains how a bold superintendent won emergency fiscal aid from the state and launched community schools, before he moved on.

The funding, of course, was crucial, and the community school modeled transformed relations among parents, teachers, students, and schools. As the model become established, it brought hope to a community that had been battered by years of bad news.

Read Jeff’s article to learn how the community schools work in Erie.

Categories Education Reform

Gary Rubinstein: NYC’s New Chancellor Runs a Chain of Low-Performing Schools

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2021 //
12

Gary Rubinstein, a math teacher at Stuyvesant High School, has no patience for overblown claims. For a few years, he maintained a website devoted to debunking the spurious claims of “miracle schools,” such as those that claimed 100% graduation rates of their seniors but neglected to admit the high attrition that occurred before senior year.

He inevitably had to review the chain called Eagle Academy, which was founded by David Banks, who is Mayor-elect Eric Adams’ choice to be Chancellor of the New York City public schools. The Eagle Academy has six schools, one in each of the city’s five boroughs, and one in Newark.

Gary reviewed public records for the data, and he wondered why none of the city’s media had done what he did.

He writes:

Before Eric Adams was the next mayor of New York City, he was the borough president of Brooklyn. In that capacity, he worked with David Banks to create ‘The Brooklyn Nine’ where Banks would share some of the best practices from Eagle Academy to improve nine schools in Brooklyn. There is a short documentary about Eagle Academy on HBO currently called ‘The Infamous Future’ , similar to Waiting For Superman, made a few years ago in which Eric Adams says that the practices of Eagle Academy should be used in more schools so that they become ‘The Brooklyn 90’ and then ‘The Brooklyn 900′ and eventually the entire school system can replicate the success of Banks’ Eagle Academies. So this gives us some idea of what to expect in the next 4 or 8 years with Adams as Mayor and Banks as Chancellor.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Media, New York City

New York Will Drop edTPA

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2021 //
51

The New York Board of Regents, which is the state’s Board of Education, has begun the process of eliminating the controversial edTPA as a requirement for certification.

The New York State United Teachers applauded the decision, which is almost certain. Theres no evidence that the test is weeding out people who would not be good teachers. It has had a disparate racial impact. At a time of teacher shortages, there’s a need to hire more teachers, not fewer.

Categories Education Reform

Do Not Forget the True Purpose of School

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2021 //
13
Mother’s first class, around 1950, at Skabersjöskolan, where I myself also went to school.

A friend in Sweden sent this article via Twitter. It was written by Jenny Maria Nilsson. I went to Google and asked for a translation from Swedish to English. Sweden is even farther down the road to privatization than we are. A conservative government in the early 1990s opened the way to public funding of independent schools, many of which operate for profit.

She writes:

The goal for primary school is not millions of different things but first and foremost education. If that goal is achieved, it certainly also provides other things: life opportunities, education and freedom, social interaction, a place for children to be and so on, but the school’s goal is teaching a basic curriculum.

In the book about the digitalisation of the Swedish school, which I have contributed to, I write: “What is the school’s task? To be a marketplace for all kinds of commerce, an arena for the edtech industry, a pseudo-market for welfare entrepreneurs and consultants, an advertising opportunity for municipalities, schools and individual teachers, a leisure center where children can thrive while parents are at work, an institution that organizes social support, a place where educators are responsible for identifying and developing great talent, an organization that will kick-start your child’s career, rank your child and let it make contacts with others in its social group, a place for admiration and curling of young people or vice versa a place where you put children in place and so on. ”

Tax-financed primary school is none of this but a “room” organized by us where previous generations through teachers and other school staff strive to convey the basic practical and theoretical knowledge that has been accumulated in various fields. The goal often seems to me to be distorted, the school system has increasingly been characterized by what I call the era of panic, where more people are looking for things that have nothing to do at school. The school has become a means for various special interests rather than a goal in itself.

To leave the era of panic, we need to navigate an era where school and school institutions and administration can maintain integrity. An era where the school is a cohesive unit that honors its knowledge and education mission – what I call the era of the monolith.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, International, Real Education

Audrey Watters “Takes on Ed Tech from Its Beginnings”

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2021 //
30

Steven J. Koutsavlis, a research associate at the National Center on Privatization in Education reviews Audrey Watters’ new book on the history of education technology in schools. Its title is Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning.

Koutsavlis writes:

On account of the pandemic, there has been a seismic shift to remote or hybrid instruction. However, long before COVID-19, forces to harness instruction to technology were at play within the American school system. In Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning (MIT Press, 2021), Audrey Watters masterfully explores this story and explains the consequences technology has had on the nature and architecture of American schooling.

As many policy analysts know, Watters has been writing incisively about this important topic since 2010 on her blog, Hack Education: The History of the Future of Education Technology. With Teaching Machines, she cements a decade of lucid, riveting commentary.

In this NCSPE excerpt, in particular, Watters establishes the foundation for her analysis with a depiction of the first efforts of the Harvard psychology professor B.F. Skinner to mechanize learning. Skinner would go on to develop several teaching machines during the Sputnik era and beyond. Watters explains how he incorporated his work as a behaviorist into the design of these learning devices.

Skinner, along with other progenitors of teaching machines such as education psychologist Sidney Pressey, aimed to pioneer the automation of pedagogy, “freeing the teacher from the drudgeries of her work so that she may do more real teaching, giving to the pupil more adequate guidance in his learning,” Watters writes. In doing so, they prioritized the interests of private entities looking to engineer systems of learning at the expense of teachers and school leaders who aimed to engender more democratic modes of education.

The posture of automated learning presumes that the work of evaluating student responses and guiding them to new levels of understanding can simply be outsourced to a programmed device and does not require the nuanced touch of a seasoned practitioner with deep content knowledge. Yet the word “assessment” itself derives from the Latin assidēre, meaning “to sit down to.” The role of the teacher to sit beside children and listen deeply and intently, not only to learn how students are approaching a particular task, question, or problem, but also to hear from them about what piques their curiosity about the work at hand and motivates them to persevere. Watters deftly details how even the most well-designed or well-intentioned teaching machines fail to achieve this. She moreover describes how critics of Skinner such as Paul Goodman raised these concerns as they saw these devices dehumanizing the educational process.

“Who, then, will watch the puzzlement on a child’s face and suddenly guess what it is that he really doesn’t understand, that has apparently nothing to do with the present problem, nor even the present subject matter?” Watters quotes approvingly from Goodman’s 1960 book, Growing Up Absurd. “And who will notice the light in his eyes and seize the opportunity to spread the glorious clarity over the whole range of knowledge; for instance, the nature of succession and series, or what grammar really is: the insightful moments that are worth years of ordinary teaching.”

Even with advanced programming and interactive computer displays, personalized teaching machines or programs may not be able to elucidate nuanced understandings of difficult concepts with struggling learners. Independent work with these programs is often unsupervised, and students may receive unauthorized assistance to particular questions instead of actually supplying their own authentic response. A recurring issue with struggling learners is also the motivation to complete the tasks themselves. Extended independent assignments often, in fact, result in fatigue and non-completion for students who are still building task stamina.

Watters also writes about the very challenges of implementing such programs, where private demands for technocratic control over the levers of schooling have clashed with the needs of actual practitioners and students. As we see in contemporary education settings, Watters documents that programs were often rolled out in a hasty and haphazard fashion, unsupported by research evidence demonstrating their effectiveness or appropriateness for students and without adequate levels of teaching training or adoption.

Programmed instruction in the form of teaching machines as well as the modern incarnation of computerized learning engines, Watters likewise makes clear, represent a highly systematized and standardized form of education that collides with more progressive, constructivist, and student-led pedagogical methods. They also reify practices and norms within school systems that promote a highly functionalist model of education, where students are fed bits of information as they are trained to complete discrete tasks serving little more than the informational needs of private companies.

While programmed learning systems and algorithms aim to provide individualization and personalized learning, Watters demonstrates how they can conversely serve to stifle creativity and individual expression, on the student, teacher, school, and system level. “These technologies foreclose rather than foster possibilities,” Watters writes.

For longtime followers of Watters’s blog, which is now on hiatus, Learning Machines will fulfill all expectations. For those who haven’t read Watters’s blog, this excerpt should pave the way to reading the book. Agree or not with Watters, readers will be glued and challenged.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, History, Technology

Kathy Irwin: The Public High School in Mayfield, Kentucky, is Serving Its Battered Community

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2021 //
6

Blog reader Kathy Irwin sent the following comment, which shows how important publicschools are as the heart of their communities. This shows why we fight against privatization of public assets, of which public schools are the most important.

She wrote:

A “pioneer” in the Community School Movement was 1929 Elsie Ripley Clapp when she took John Dewey’s thinking on democracy into The Ballard Memorial School in Jefferson County Kentucky. Not all that far from Mayfield, Kentucky where today the public high school is still standing after last night’s devastating series of tornadoes.

Mayfield High School has been turned into a shelter. People are taking refuge there. They are being fed, treated for injuries, fed nourishing, cafeteria meals. Clothing is provided, WiFi, relocation services, even transportation to another safe destination.

It does not take much to imagine this as an example of a community school IN ACTION. No one chose this weather catastrophe but it serves to remind us of what resources community schools can coordinate when administering to The Moment.

Elsie Clapp later ran a community school in FDR’s industrially ravaged Arthurdale, West Virginia. Starving families were literally selling body & soul just to stay alive when this Great Depression era school sprang up from a buckwheat farm and began demonstrating how public schools can enter a crisis and become the HUB and the ❤️ HEART of people-directed restoration and recovery.

Charter schools are in no position to do any of this work. It is not in their “DNA”. But it is the genetic makeup of community schools and there is plenty of crisis at hand. The Pandemic is the monster opportunity but so is the climate crisis headed our way.

Elsie Ripley Clapp learned how to enter, enjoy and energize the very humane energy stream of people-powered problem-solving. Community schools walk right into the middle of the fray, facing it head-on because they are the practical embodiment of We The People.

Thank you, Kathy!

Categories Education Reform

Leonie Haimson: To Reduce Inequality, Cut Class Sizes

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2021 //
23

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, is one of the nation’s most persistent advocates of class size reduction. She is the voice of many parents in New York City, who regularly tell pollsters that their number 1 wish for their children is smaller classes. Now that the city’s public schools anticipate a new infusion of funds, Haimson and many parents are pressing to get a commitment from the city to reduce class sizes.

She writes in The Nation:

New York City public schools are often as crushed as the subway during rush hour, with literally thousands of students forced to learn in overstuffed classrooms—sitting side by side, elbows knocking into each other, or sometimes leaning against the wall or resting on a radiator. Even in the age of Covid-19, hallways are so jam-packed it can be hard for students to get to their next class.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way—and, if the city’s mayor and the City Council speaker would pass a crucial piece of legislation limiting class sizes in New York’s public schools, it wouldn’t have to continue. But as the end of the council’s term ticks closer, the two are standing in the way of a popular bill, adding a new and frustrating chapter to a drama that’s been playing out for decades.

New York City parents and educators have been calling for smaller class sizes since at least the 1960s. In 2003, the state’s highest court agreed with them. It concluded that class sizes were too large to provide students with their right, guaranteed by the state Constitution, to a sound basic education. It found that the plaintiffs, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, “presented measurable proof” that New York City schools have “excessive class sizes, and that class size affects learning.” It concluded:“The number of children in these straits is large enough to represent a systemic failure.”

To remedy this and other inequities, the court ordered that the state provide more funding to high-needs districts, and in 2007, the state passed a law requiring New York City to use these funds to lower class size. But then the Great Recession hit, and the full state funding never materialized. Class sizes actually increased.

Today, classes in the city’s public schools are larger than they were in 2003—especially in the early grades. Before the pandemic hit in 2020, more than 330,000 students—roughly a third of the school population—were crammed into classes of 30 or more. On average, classes in the city’s public schools are 15 percent to 30 percent larger than they are in the rest of the state. While both Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio, the city’s most recent mayors, promised to address this critical inequity during their campaigns, both failed to follow through once elected.

Now, the pandemic has brought the perennial problem of class size into sharper focus, as the need for social distancing has made smaller classes more critical than ever. At the same time, Covid-19 has helped bring unprecedented resources that could be used to address the issue: Over the next three years, the city is due to receive an additional $8 billion in federal and state funds for our schools.

The federal funds are meant to help the city improve both the health and safety of the classroom environment—goals that smaller classes could help achieve. The state funds—which amount to $1.3 billion in additional annual aid, due to be phased in over three years—represent the long-overdue fulfillment of the mandate of the CFE case.

Together, these funds represent a remarkable opportunity, one the City Council recognized when it proposed that a substantial portion of them be allocated toward reducing class size. But the mayor balked. So the council’s education chair, Mark Treyger, introduced Int. 2374 in July, a bill that would effectively phase in smaller classes over three years. It would do this by increasing the per student square footage required in classrooms, ranging from about 18 to 26, depending on the grade level and room size.

The legislation currently has 41 cosponsors out of 50 members—a supermajority that could overturn the mayor’s likely veto. Yet the vote on this bill has been delayed by Speaker Corey Johnson, despite the fact that there are fewer than two weeks before the council adjourns for the year and a new one takes over in January.

Read on to review the research supporting the value of class size reduction as the most important and effective reform that schools should enact.

Why is City Council Chair Corey Johnson blocking this crucial measure?

Categories Class size, Class Size Matters Org, Education Reform, New York City, Parent Groups, Parents

Steve Ruis: Are Democrats Tricking the GOP into Resisting Vaccines?

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2021 //
99

Steve Ruis posed an interesting suggestion in a comment yesterday. What if Democrats tricked Republicans into fighting vaccines and masks?

He wrote:

Maybe we should approach this using the mechanisms of the GOP. Spread the rumor that the anti-vax/anti-mask campaigns were created by liberals to deliberately expose GOP voters to the deadly disease. GOP voters are known to be older and more likely to die if they get the disease, so they have been targeted with these fake news campaigns.

Of course! Qui bono when diehard conservatives drop like flies from the COVID?

What if Steve is right?

What if it was undercover Democrats who persuaded Trump voters that masking and vaccines are for sissies and that real Americans, real men and women, don’t wear masks and never get vaccinated?

What sane Republican would want conservative families to fight against public health measures?

The entire Trump family is vaccinated, but that means nothing to the anti-vaxxers.

What kind of mind control has convinced them that it is fine for Trump and Melania to get the shot, but they don’t need it?

Even Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar are ridiculing the vaccine. They were tricked too.

The Republican base is supplying the great majority of COVID deaths.

When will they figure out that they were hoaxed?

Categories Democrats, Education Reform, Fraud, Health, Republicans
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